When Liberals Lose Montreal

The Carnage is not over

Monday night, the Liberals narrowly lost LaSalle—Émard—Verdun to the Bloc in a closely watched byelection. After the June loss of Toronto—St Pauls, all eyes were on the Montreal riding once held by Paul Martin. The lessons are stark.

Liberal candidate Laura Palestini did not have the backing of the riding’s own members, having not been selected in a nomination process but rather appointed by the party. Appointing a candidate without a nomination is a power the leader has and, to his credit, Trudeau has rarely exercised.

That his national campaign director quit just nine days before the vote suggests that the data was looking pretty grim through the campaign, and the governing party’s internal data no doubt shows it is widespread throughout the country, with little hope of recovery.

A more careful look at Monday’s results tells more of the story. The Bloc won the riding, yes, but with fewer votes (8,884) than their distant-second finish three years ago (10,693). The NDP and Conservative vote too bore only modest shifts from their previous results. The Liberal vote, by contrast, completely collapsed, staying home in vast numbers.

Former Justice Minister David Lametti garnered 21,271 votes in the riding in 2021; Palestini just 8,636 this week. It is a story we have seen before and a harbinger of things to come.

Aside from Conservative support being at near record high, consistently polling over 40% and comfortably in majority government territory, Liberal support is soft. When The Liberals collapsed in the 2011 election and Stephen Harper took the Conservatives from minority to majority, his party gained around 600,000 votes nationwide vs the previous election, but the Liberals lost nearly 900,000 votes. Swing votes swung, but capital-’L’ Liberals stayed home in droves, uninspired by a leader who didn’t connect with the people and didn’t seem to have a clear idea of why he was there.

Pierre Poilievre isn’t winning because he’s Pierre. He’s winning because he’s Not Trudeau. The public in general, and Liberals in particular, are tired of the Prime Minister. They blame all the ills of our current economy and society on him, despite the fact that not only are few his fault, but under his stewardship Canada is outperforming most of the developed world in most metrics. Facts, as I’ve noted before, matter little if you lose the narrative.

Trudeau, for his part, either believes he can restore the hope and hard work message of 2015 and bring Canadians back with him, falling into the death trap where Liberals believe people will vote for them just because they try hard, or, more likely, he simply wants to be the one to lose so that the next leader can work off of a clean slate and start fresh, in a position to dissociate themselves from Trudeau and rebuild from the ground up.

There is also, I suspect, a strong sense in the war room that the US election will help the Liberals, regardless of outcome. A Trump win, now looking increasingly unlikely, gives Canadians something to vote against. A Harris win gives Canadians something to vote for. Both would tend to benefit the Liberals. Having a federal election this fall, overlapping the final stages of the US election and going to a vote only days after the Americans, offers some hope of campaign-time redemption.

With the US election on November 5th, and Remembrance Day the following Monday being politically out of bounds for a vote, I would expect Canada to go to the polls on Monday, November 18th, just 13 days after the US, if the government loses a confidence vote — likely at the next opposition day in the current scenario, with the NDP no longer supporting this government through their confidence-and-supply agreement.

That highly charged political environment south of the border may have a significant impact on the Canadian election, and there is a chance that Poilievre can be so clearly associated with Trump when people are paying attention in that period that political fortunes can change enough to make a difference… but I doubt it will be enough. That there is active organising going on for the next Liberal leadership suggests most people still involved also don’t think it will be, either.

The trouble, then, is that there seems to be a consensus in the party building around placing Mark Carney as the next federal Liberal leader. The courtship has been strong, the background organising already well under way.

Carney ran the central banks in both Canada and the United Kingdom, but has never run a political organisation let alone run a country. Nor does he have the experience of elected office and the grassroots, ground level campaigns that come with them to connect with common citizens. He has been appointed as the Chair of a Leader’s Task Force on Economic Growth by the Party (not the government), not a commission on, say, the grassroots rebuilding of the brand, team, and fundraising machine. If Carney becomes leader but does not control the party, it means the party will control him. And that means Justin Trudeau’s team will still be running the show.

The last, ironic act of a defeated Prime Minister may be to appoint his own successor to the party leadership — and hope that it goes better for Mark than it did for Laura Palestini.